


Sins

by khaleesian



Category: Fast and the Furious (2001)
Genre: April Showers Challenge, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-04
Updated: 2011-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-17 14:37:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khaleesian/pseuds/khaleesian





	Sins

How can a person be so very, very good on everyone else’s behalf and so very, very bad on her own?

She pauses while brushing her hair. It’s hot today; she’s doing as much grooming as she can before slipping into her clothes. It’s going to be scorching down at the garage, one of those days where the windowless darkness just makes it an airless oven, not a cool sanctuary.

It’s never been a sanctuary. Not for her. She’s already tired just thinking about it.

Dom calls from below that he’s leaving. She finds herself nodding and it’s only after he yells again, his voice sharpened with impatience, that she hollers back. She thinks to herself that it’s very L.A. They take separate cars to drive a mile. With Dom gone, the house seems quieter for no reason that she can put her finger on. It’s just emptier with him gone.

She’s glad of it though. One thing that Dom’s taught her but good: the welcome silence and concentration of a drive. Space to think or remember.

Remember, remembering: it seems like there was a time when comfortable silence wasn’t so hard to come by. The sound of her mom humming in the kitchen, her dad whistling in the driveway. Dear Lord, to be a kid again, to lean back into the indulgent support of half a dozen adults and her grinning older brother…

This is stupid. She says aloud, “This is stupid.” to her reflection in the glass. Her reflection nods back at her, but her eyes are still stinging. She goes back to the sink, grips the porcelain hard while she waits for the coolest water to gurgle up from the tap.

Oddly, the memory comes to her, the decals she’d carefully pasted on Brian’s replicant Supra yesterday. The pointing finger forward, onward. The expressionless Art Deco style face. She looks at her reflection and makes her face still and smooth. Chills the hot breath in her lungs, inhaling deeply. Discards all the things she’s feeling in favor of what she should be feeling.

She’s the glue holding them together. She’s the grease on all their squeaky wheels.

There is no force on earth that can break her. She says this mantra to herself in one form or another almost every day. She squares her shoulders, raises her chin a little. It will get better, forward, onward. This too shall pass, one day, one day, one day it will be her day.

She’s a Toretto after all.

God damn it, one day that better mean _something_.

Mia: _pride_

 

Everyone has something here. Everyone. It’s a big city; it stretches out in every direction as far as the eye can see. Even the mountains look trifling next to it. The only thing that the city doesn’t dwarf is the Pacific Ocean. You have to have _**something**_ or you disappear.

Leon’s standing next to his best friend, a genius, doing his genius thing. Jesse is on about some idea he’s got for modding some turbocharger that’ll make this tired old Honda do something Formula One. Jesse’s bursts of words and quirks of hand gestures make about as much sense as a Jackson Pollock painting to Leon.

“Jess,” Leon tries not to sound too exasperated. “Just tell us what to **do**.”

Letty’s looking at him with eyebrows raised, enough beauty and attitude that she should be well on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. He knows they’ll lose her someday soon, she’s growing too big to stand in Dom’s shadow. He longs for her sometimes, silently, in half-glances. The last of those half-glances catches Dom striding out from the storeroom, tires under each arm. He drops them in a pile, nudging them together with the edge of his foot, before walking up and giving the Honda an expectant look.

Jesse’s explanation launches into hyperdrive. Halfway through, Dom starts nodding and grinning. Leon wonders if Dom really understands or maybe Dom is just humoring the kid. Dom shuts Jesse up with a thumbs up and a curt ‘Do it’. Dom leans over Letty for a second, spreading a patch of grease on her cheekbone until it looks like warpaint. She shoves Dom playfully, grabs the Honda’s sideview mirror and then mugs for Jesse who does a convincing war whoop.

“This is what y’all do when you tell me you’re working?” Vince drawls from the doorway. Vince shoves a sixpack into Leon’s hands, throws a mock punch at Letty and a single beer at Dom, all while not breaking stride back to the tiny toilet at the rear of the office.

Leon glances back at Dom, trying to think if there’s something he wants to ask or say. He only has a minute now, with everyone piling in, Dom’s conversational plate gets full pretty quickly. Vince comes back from the john while Leon’s still considering, throws an arm around Dom’s shoulder and starts murmuring in his ear. Dom makes a wry face and answers low. It’s probably some detail about the next job or some other harebrained idea of Vince’s but Leon still feels a pang, knowing that he would never take ‘best friend’ status for granted if he had it.

Dom’s eyes are on Letty while he listens to Vince and Leon has a weird moment of wondering what it must be like to be able to go into a room with Dom and shut the door.

Brian and Mia rock up loaded with bags of a fast-food dinner and Dom’s distraction is complete. They move out to the lot where they can spread out and catch the last rays while they eat.

Everyone has _something_ here. Leon takes a deep breath and looks around at his crew, the beautiful, the genius, the dangerous and the very, very fast. He tries to figure out just what he has that’s all his.

Leon: _envy_

 

Back in the city, it’s hot and the air seems to be slowly losing ground to the exhaust. Out here, on the edge of the world, a thread of breeze steals all the warmth of the blazing sun. It’s not enough to ruffle his hair, but enough to make him shiver in his tee-shirt. The ocean radiates chill and they’re closer to **it** than they are to the sun. Dom doesn’t shiver, but Brian sees goosebumps on his forearms. They’re both braced against the wind, watching the waves break over the concrete chunks that shore up the fringe of the road opposite Neptune’s Net.

Surfers call to each other, gulls scream over scraps of bread. Brian jams his hands deeper into his pockets. It’s astonishingly cold, but he’s not going to be the one to break first. Dom will say something about going home soon enough, and Brian’s trying to absorb as much of this as he can…this standing next to Dom watching the light fade, which is providing enough of its own private warmth to offset the gusts off the ocean.

When the sun hits the tops of the Malibu hills, Dom doesn’t even speak; he just nudges Brian’s shoulder when he turns. Brian follows him back to the car, one long step behind. Dom stops by the driver side and raises his palm without looking at Brian. Brian’s tempted to make an issue of it, tease Dom a little about his mistrust of Brian’s cutthroat curve-taking. But something stops him. It might have been pleasure enough to perform for Dom earlier, to feel his gaze and approval, but it might be just as pleasant to have an opportunity to watch Dom.

Instead of tossing the keys, he passes them over, feeling that Dom’s palm is still warm even if the tips of his fingers are cold. He slides into the passenger seat. The car has trapped the heat of the day and he can feel his taut muscles almost instantly relax. Dom looks down at him as he thrusts into reverse and almost chuckles when Brian slides the seat back and reclines it to a hedonistic angle.

Dom doesn’t head back the way they came. He turns up into some canyon road that Brian’s never seen before, a tiny twist of a road that they have pretty much to themselves. Within minutes, they’re up on the ridgeline and the Supra is scalloped in sunlight for a moment.

Dom drives with economy, letting the revs build evenly and shifting so smoothly that Brian could almost let himself fall into the nap that he’s pretending to have. Canyon roads demand attention and Dom’s eyes never move, except quick flickers to the mirrors. Brian relaxes completely, lets his head rock in the curves. He’s fascinated by the shadow where Dom’s bicep meets his sleeve. Watching the last light play over Dom’s arm, shoulder and ear is hypnotic in its own way.

He’s not asleep, but he’s halfway there. The hum of the engine is making it hard for him to keep his eyes even half-open. Tomorrow, the next day, and the next, things are going to happen, things that he won’t be able to predict or control. But this is now and it’s warm.

Maybe Dom’s a thief, maybe Brian’s not as good a cop as he thinks he should be, but it doesn’t matter now. He’s not really asleep, but this is as good as a dream. He stretches and settles his head easier in the circle of his arm. Dom grins down at him indulgently. Brian closes his eyes.

Brian: _sloth_

 

He’s got a fan of twenties in his pocket and he’s starving. The line at the Fatburger is making him shift from foot to foot with frustration, like he has to use the can. The guy directly in front of him looks like a ditherer, so Vince makes no bones about cutting ahead of him. The guy chokes off his indignant ‘hey!’ when Vince turns and gives him an extra-special scowl.

He would normally make a little bit of an effort not to be such a dick, but hunger is no longer just twisting his guts, it’s now worked its wormlike way into his skull. His head is pounding. He’s barking his order before the girl behind the counter can finish her ‘welcometoFatburgerwhatcanIgetyoutoday?” spiel.

She blinks behind her glasses and a part of Vince blesses her for bringing the fries before she starts to work on his milkshake. He munches the fries right off the tray, no ketchup. Another zombified employee pours him a Coke, another one tosses a stack of onion rings onto the tray. They’re like an army of robots building a wall of crappy food.

As soon as the burger, the jewel in the junk food crown, is in place, Vince is off to a corner booth. He doesn’t want to look at anyone, doesn’t want anyone to look at him. He grabs a squeeze bottle of ketchup from the tasteful arrangement at the end of the table and covers his burger, fries and rings with a few loops and swirls.

He chews without tasting and looks at the other side of the empty booth without seeing. The food is filling, but unsatisfying for some reason. It’s like throwing handfuls of dust into a hole. It’s like his body knows he should be eating something else, doing something else, being somewhere else.

According to that look on Dom’s face, maybe he should _**be**_ someone else. His teeth crush the meat. He squeezes his drink so hard that the plastic top snaps off. He smushes one French fry into an unhappy little mound of potato paste. He chews so hard his jaw starts to ache. Part of him longs for something crunchier, harder to chew, maybe, like the snowman’s _goddamned bones_.

Vince pushes the tray away. He manages to swallow the last of the food in his mouth, though his gag reflex fights him hard for a second. The smell of it is so disgusting, he can’t even bring himself to throw it away. The stench of frying oil clings until he skids out of the parking lot.

He’s walking stiff-legged up the driveway before he realizes what he’s doing. The last thing he wants at this moment is a showdown with Dom, because he doesn’t know which way it’ll go and that puts a hole in him so big, that nothing on earth will fill it. His body keeps walking without any real input or effort from him.

The scent of the barbecue makes him hurt all over again. He hardly hears their words until Dom gives him valediction and then he can relax a little, relax and sit down, just in time to hear Letty, _he’s always hungry_.

He stares across the table at those baby blues and thinks _sister, you have no idea._

Vince: _gluttony_

 

A cash business is, in many ways, a very satisfying thing.

Dom doesn’t like to use rubber bands on the bricks of bills he has painstakingly amassed over the years, putting a little (okay, a lot) away toward the rainy days that always seem to find the Torettos through the L.A. sun. Rubber bands pinch and wear away at the faces, make the bills look sketchy. He keeps his cash in unobtrusive envelopes, ready to distribute, ready to thumb through, and easy to hide. Manifold Mr. Franklins look out at him benevolently from a couple of dozen envelopes both here and at the house.

It’s security. It’s freedom. It’s a lot of things.

What it mostly is, is _**essential**_. If Dom should have to dig too deeply for anything, if the cash should flow the wrong way for a while, he can feel the nerves move up his spine until they’re a constant tickle at the back of his throat. He finds himself blinking a lot, because his peripheral vision goes to shit. He always feels like something or someone is creeping up on him.

It doesn’t happen often. Mostly because he won’t let it. Near constant vigilance makes the piles grow more often than they shrink. Sometimes Dom wonders vaguely how many envelopes he’ll have to have before he can stop.

He had a figure once. He passed it without noticing. It’s like shaving seconds off his time, it only matters if someone else calls him to account for himself and no one around here manages to do that. Now it’s mostly an abstract idea, like Mexico. They get to an arbitrary figure that represents ultimate freedom and they vanish. That’s the plan. Very simple.

What’s the not-simple part is that sometimes Dom looks at Mia’s neat handwriting in the books and thinks that he’s wasting today, trying to earn tomorrow. One thing that he learned in prison: tomorrow comes anyway. He doesn’t know why he’s so convinced that this existence here has got to **end** , that somehow it can’t continue.

It’s got to end, because eventually, his reflexes will degrade. Eventually, he won’t have the races and then this place will get more claustrophobic than it already is. The stacks and stacks of bills are a hedge against that day; they represent some wide open space that will replace the clarity of speed. It’s a little green escape hatch. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know where it’s leading.

It’s leading _**out**_. That’s all that matters.

A quick count of the envelopes quiets the niggling voice inside that tells him that he’s never going to find the freedom he craves because he’s _bad_ at freedom, he’s _scared_ of freedom…he wouldn’t know what to do with it, even if he had a little.

He turns and sees that new guy who’s become a perennial at Mia’s counter and thinks to himself that maybe only death will let him stop wanting what he can’t have.

 

Dom: _avarice_

 

She hates God sometimes, for putting her in this body.

It’s a fine body from one perspective, she’s strong, she’s fit. She’s got curves other women envy. It does what she tells it to. She can feel her own energy radiating from her heart to the tips of her fingers, the way her 240SX pushes its power down to where the tires press the road.

But she’s so small.

She’s shorter than Mia, which is why she favors the city-stomping platforms. She can advertise the tight line of her bicep, the shadow of washboard abs all she wants, but she’s been a shrimp since they were all in high school. The cars weren’t the only reason she watched Dom like a skinny, Latina hawk. Dom has always been big and he moves like he believes he’s even bigger. She watched him to learn that trick.

Some girls get cocky, encased in 2,000 pounds of metal. Letty’s never started anything with her car that she couldn’t back up with her fist, but as hard as she works, the boys in the crew won’t let her forget that she weighs 110 pounds with her tool belt on. They fear her mouth more than her jabs.

Sometimes she wishes she could punch Dom, really clean his clock. Break a couple of knuckles on that hard head. She knows how hard he is all over. She knows where he’s soft, too. Sometimes she just wants to pummel him, make him think twice about some of the shit he says, make him look at her with half the respect he gives that motherfucking black car. Dom’s got them all twisted around, but good. Vince might could take him, even Brian or Leon could get a few licks in, but it would never occur to those punks to even _try_.

She’s not afraid of him.

One good punch would be good for him, really. Make him wake up and smell the coffee. In this body, her best weapon is that no one is expecting her.

Usually, she loves it when Dom vaults her up in his arms. He always picks moments of mutual delight and she’s elated then to be lifted as easily as a child. But now, when he’s looking at her across the garage like this, the rage and mistrust in his eyes as black and sticky as oil, the knowledge that he could toss her like a rag doll (not that he _would_ ), makes her fold her arms, when she might speak.

She has only acknowledged this to herself a couple of times and the shame burns. She can’t forgive him for never being a little frightened of the power that is her.

She stokes the rage inside herself, pushing it down, imagining that she’s a forged cylinder, filled with chilled air and nitrous oxide.

She only needs a spark.

Letty: _wrath_

 

He notices between one step and the next and nearly trips on the curb. A Korean woman walking next to him recoils when she senses he’s about to fall into her, but he doesn’t even notice her startled look. His eyes are too…full.

The curves. The color! God, something like…. _her_ …in this neighborhood. She stands out like a blonde south of Broadway.

He crosses the street without looking. The screeches and shouts that follow him come to him muffled, like he’s going deaf because his eyes are so full. All he can see is _her_ , her knockout proportions, her gorgeous, gorgeous lines. The hot L.A. sun just caresses her; the brightness doesn’t expose one flaw.

He stands two feet from her and finds it difficult to catch his breath. She’s practically twinkling at him. Oh my God, oh my God, omydeargod.

He takes a long, long look at her ass end and mentally, he strips her naked. Just imagining the engine, the forged aluminum pistons, the all-aluminum cylinder heads is making him get stiff. Her induction system and twin ball bearing turbos all feeding down to a sexy oval bore and an aluminum intake manifold are making him salivate just a little too much. He swallows and flexes his fingers.

He wants to touch. He must not touch. No fingerprints may mar her finish.

Since he can’t possibly touch, he finds himself murmuring to her. Oddly, he can only murmur a litany that he knows she must already know intimately, by heart. He feels like a fool, but it’s the only way they can connect. “750 horsepower. 700 pounds of torque. 6,250 rpm redline, you sexy little bitch.”

He can say that, because as long, sleek, and powerful as she is, she only weighs a ton and a half. She carries most of that in her rear and he just wants to pop the back hatch and get his hands deep inside her. He steps back and takes a deep breath before he does something unseemly.

The styling makes him tug surreptitiously at the seam of his Levis. Gullwing doors of all things. He wants to lick the hood. The aerodynamic rocker panel side skirting makes her look so trim and seductive. From her front profile he can just see that she turns like she’s on a gimbal ring.

Furtively, he looks around for whomever is lucky enough to get inside this baby. Looking down at her smooth interior and deliciously substantial gearshift, he finds himself whispering again. “You’re so gorgeous. I want you so bad. You’ve done it in ten and a half seconds, haven’t you?”

He imagines her answering rev…he bets that it’s low and even and husky. Like what Kathleen Turner would sound like if she were a Saleen S7.

He’s in love, he’s in love, _he’s in love!_

Jesse: _lust_

t. End


End file.
